Auteur director Steven Soderbergh is taking a hard left into supernatural horror with his latest film, Presence, and we’re all amped up for it. Featuring a script from Jurassic Park writer David Koepp, the film about a family who moves into a house that’s already “occupied” by something else has released a new teaser trailer from a…let’s say unique perspective.
The teaser isn’t really much of anything, to be honest: just a slow pull in on a young girl asleep in her bed, completely unaware that she’s being watched by something otherworldly. Text overlays the single shot, about what the young woman will experience in the presumably haunted house, but the teaser’s only a minute long, so there’s not much else to see.
But all of that is for good reason. Presence’s big draw is the fact that it’s a supernatural horror film told from the perspective of an unusual character: the entity itself, rather than any of the human characters in the film. This strategy won the film major praise at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, where it made its premiere, and it isn’t the first horror film this year to employ that tactic. A new kind of slasher wowed audiences earlier this year when In a Violent Nature hit theaters and they got to experience a slasher film not from the perspective of the victims being hunted, but of the slasher himself.
Additionally, the film’s poster is running with a unique angle, focusing not on the supernatural aspects of the story but on Soderbergh’s currency in Hollywood as a big-name director. The titles of his past films, including distinctly non-thriller titles like Erin Brockovich and Magic Mike, are superimposed over a ghostly face, which gives no real indication of what audiences can expect once the film arrives in theaters in January.
This isn’t the first time distributor Neon has drawn out the promotion for their upcoming horror films with small, bite-sized teases of what’s to come. The same was true of the marketing for Longlegs, which danced around showing Nicolas Cage’s titular killer – or even Maika Monroe’s FBI agent — by releasing a series of cryptic, chilling teasers, each more indecipherable than the last. And if that film’s success is anything to go by, it’s not a bad strategy at all.
Presence stars Lucy Liu, Chris Sullivan, Callina Liang, Eddy Maday, Julia Fox, and West Mulholland, and arrives in theaters on January 17, 2025. Check out the new teaser down below:
